Baseball players develop the necessary skills through practice, either by playing the game or by training exercises under the guidance of a coach. Batting is one of the skills that usually require a great deal of practice, but when young players want to practice, they are not always able to find players or coaches who have the inclination to or can take the time to pitch balls for batting practice, field balls the practicing batter hits and catch balls the batter misses.
There have been efforts to deal with the problem of nonavailability of players and coaches at the times when the batter is ready to practice. Some of these, for example pitching machines with ball catching netting, are beyond the means of most players. The young player usually relies upon family members, neighbors and others to participate in the practice sessions, but such help is not always conveniently available when a player would like to practice batting.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,637,209 discloses a ball tethered by a string to a handle by which a coach may swing the ball past the practicing batter, who tries to bat the ball. While such a device substantially eliminates the need to field the ball when hit by the batter and to catch it when missed by the batter, it still requires a coach or operator to swing the ball so the batter can practice batting, and its use involves some risk in that the batter may hit the ball in a way that it does not just reverse direction in traveling its circular path, but instead can at times travel the short path directly to the coach so fast that the coach, unable to duck the ball in time, is struck by it. While the use of a rubber ball strong enough to be hit by a bat, suggested by said patent, may tend to reduce the risk of injury to the operator or coach, such a ball does not have the physical qualities of a regulation baseball and thus, when hit with a bat, does not give the feel due to the weight and the resiliency of a regulation baseball which the batter's hands sense as a result of impact of the bat with a regulation baseball.
An object of this invention is to provide a baseball batting practice device in which the ball the batter hits with his bat has substantially the characteristics of a regulation baseball.